The present invention relates generally to improving the setup and operation of video-wall displays and particularly to network addressable displays.
A video-wall display system is a method to overcome the costs of manufacturing and installing very large displays, by assembling a large display using multiple smaller displays arranged and working together. By dividing a single image into several sub-images and displaying the sub-images on an appropriately arranged array of display devices a larger display with higher resolution can be created.
Traditional video-wall methods involve pre-processing and time-syncing separate video files (a method unable to deal with real-time content); distributing the entire video file to all devices and having them individually render the whole file and crop to the relevant portion for their display (a method unable to deal with high-resolution content unless each display is equipped with a powerful server and network), and/or using traditional video cards connected to the server (which requires the server to be physically close to the video-wall or requires expensive proprietary and complex video extension systems). All of these conventional approaches have significant limitations therefore a new approach is desirable.
In a traditionally video-wall graphical application content is rendered to a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) where it is then directly output by the GPU to the attached display(s). Hence this traditional approach to video-walls requires the server to house one physical video output (and attached display) for each segment of the video wall. The requirement for a physical video output limits both the size (number of potential attached screens) and the distance to the displays that can be achieved with a single video wall server.
Network Video-Wall:
As a method of reducing costs, increasing flexibility and performance and adding redundancy, there is a general need to be able to display real-time content on a video-wall employing low-cost/low-power endpoint devices that are in communication with a powerful central server that sends them video content via a traditional network. This approach allows source content to be changed dynamically (for example from live video feeds) with minimal (e.g., undetectable to the human eye) time delay, and without intensive pre-rendering of the source file itself. If the power needs of the endpoints are low, they can be met by power over Ethernet, and such endpoints do not need to have an independent power delivery. Additionally this network-to-server based approach ensures that displays can be automatically switched to a back-up failover server and resume playing content in the event that the original server fails. This approach also allows a single server to simultaneously drive the playback of multiple video-walls in different locations (each video-wall could either playing different content or show the same image in several rooms with negligible additional CPU usage). Further by using this method, a single video-wall server can be configured to replicate the source content across multiple video-walls (synchronized outputting of an input source—to multiple output video-walls) with reduced cost of acquiring, splitting and rendering the content; The general video-wall invention can be modified to allow both input source and output displays to be changed on the fly (enabling individual displays to be dynamically added into or removed from the video-wall without interrupting playback on other displays).